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Obtain age-standardized health impacts

Source: R/standardize.R
standardize.Rd

This function obtains age-standardized health impacts based on multiple age-group specific assessments

Usage

standardize(output_attribute, age_group, ref_prop_pop = NULL)

Arguments

output_attribute

List containing the outputs of the healthiar::attribute_health() assessments for each age group (each list element should be an age group-specific assessment).

age_group

String vector with the age groups included in the age standardization. The vector refers to age-dependent data in this function and to output_attribute (if provided).

ref_prop_pop

Numeric vector specifying with the reference proportion of population for each age group. If this argument is empty, the proportion of population by age group in the provided data will be used.

Value

This function returns a list containing:

1) health_main (tibble) containing the age-standardized main results;

2) health_detailed (tibble) containing the results per age group.

Details

Methodology

This function applies the direct method of standardization, where the age-specific rates observed in a study population are applied to a standard (reference) population distribution.

For age standardization in health impact assessments, the World Health Organization (Ahmad et al. 2001) and the Global Burden of Disease study (GBD 2019 Demographics Collaborators 2020) provide the relevant information on this topic.

Detailed information about the methodology (including equations) is available in the package vignette. More specifically, see chapters:

This function works after running attribute_health() or attribute_lifetable() functions. If you want to use it in combination with compare(), please standardize first the results of attribute functions and then compare.

References

Ahmad OB, Pinto CB, Lopez AD, Murray CJ, Lozano R, Inoue M (2001). “Age standardization of rates: a new WHO standard.” Technical Report GPE Discussion Paper Series: No. 31, World Health Organization, Geneva.

GBD 2019 Demographics Collaborators (2020). “Global age-sex-specific fertility, mortality, healthy life expectancy (HALE), and population estimates in 204 countries and territories, 1950-2019: a comprehensive demographic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019.” The Lancet, 396(10258), 1160-1203. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30977-6 .

See also

Author

Alberto Castro & Axel Luyten

Examples

# Goal: age-standardize two age group-specific impacts
output_attribute <- attribute_health(
  rr_central = 1.063,
  rr_increment = 10,
  erf_shape = "log_linear",
  cutoff_central =  0,
  age_group = c("below_40", "above_40"),
  exp_central = c(8.1, 10.9),
  bhd_central = c(1000, 4000),
  population = c(100000, 500000)
)
results <- standardize(
  output_attribute = output_attribute,
  age_group = c("below_40", "above_40"),
  ref_prop_pop = c(0.5, 0.5)
)
results$health_detailed$results_raw$impact_per_100k_inhab # age group-specific impact rate
#> [1] 48.28250 51.53977
results$health_main$impact_per_100k_inhab # age-standardized impact rate
#> [1] 49.91113